The present invention relates to a storage device management method in a computer system, a computer system, a storage device, and a management computer, particularly, to a method for managing a storage device in a computer system capable of effectively grasping the storage device use state and the file allocation information.
Recently, the computer system size has been increased and various programs for business have begun to be used. So, the I/O device of the computer system should effectively operate a plenty of data of various types. For this, the computer system should have a function to acquire the storage device use state and the file allocation information stored in a storage device effectively.
As for the method for reducing the overhead required for acquiring information such as the use state of the storage device via the aforementioned I/O device, for example, there is a conventional technique disklosed in JP-A-2002-132552. According to this conventional technique, a cache memory provided in the disk control unit of the storage device stores a volume list and a catalogue file as file allocation information. Moreover, physical region data is resident in the cache memory and the resident state can be released.
In the aforementioned conventional technique, the volume list is stored in the cache memory, which is not accompanied by the I/O operation to/from the disk device of the storage device and accordingly, it becomes possible to acquire the volume list information with low overheads. Moreover, since the catalogue managing the entire system file information can be handled as a type of file, the aforementioned conventional technique can acquire the catalog information with low overheads like the volume list.